https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/
Here are some of the works that will be entering the public domain in 2020. (To find more material from 1924, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)
[...] Unfortunately, the fact that works from 1924 are legally available does not mean they are actually available. After 95 years, many of these works are already lost or literally disintegrating (as with old films and recordings), evidence of what long copyright terms do to the conservation of cultural artifacts. In fact, one of the items we feature below, Clark Gable's debut in White Man, apparently no longer exists. For the works that have survived, however, their long-awaited entry into the public domain is still something to celebrate. (Under the 56-year copyright term that existed until 1978, we would really have something to celebrate – works from 1963 would be entering the public domain in 2020!)
Related Stories
As the new year starts, Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain reminds us that works from 1926 ascend to public domain, and become available for use by any and all in any manner they may wish. There is also a lot of recorded music starting to enter the public domain, as an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 hit the scene. Most of them music recordings are salvaged from very fragile 78 RPM platters using multiple methods.
In 2022, the public domain will welcome a lot of “firsts”: the first Winnie-the-Pooh book from A. A. Milne, the first published novels from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the first books of poems from Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. What’s more, for the first time ever, thanks to a 2018 law called the Music Modernization Act, a special category of works—sound recordings—will finally begin to join other works in the public domain. On January 1 2022, the gates will open for all of the recordings that have been waiting in the wings. Decades of recordings made from the advent of sound recording technology through the end of 1922—estimated at some 400,000 works—will be open for legal reuse.
Why celebrate the public domain? When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. That is something Winnie-the-Pooh would appreciate. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1926 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1926 are out of circulation. When they enter the public domain in 2022, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. The whole point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But it also ensures that those rights last for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! As explained in a New York Times editorial:
- When a work enters the public domain it means the public can afford to use it freely, to give it new currency . . . [public domain works] are an essential part of every artist’s sustenance, of every person’s sustenance.
See also, What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2022? A festive countdown which, were it not blocked by javascript, would highlight a selection of what has become available.
Previously:
(2021) Public Domain Day in the USA: Works from 1925 are Open to All!
(2020) January 1, 2020 is Public Domain Day: Works From 1924 Are Open to All!
(2018) Public Domain Day is Coming
(2014) Happy Public Domain Day: Here are the Works that Copyright Extension Stole From You in 2015
and more ...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:16AM (2 children)
If more pirating went on, more works would be around! Like the pirated lost Dr Who episodes.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:44AM (1 child)
Absolutely.
I've pirated all of Disney up to 2012, along with Looney Tunes and Pink Panther. By the time those Disney cartoons are liberated, none of the originals would've survived. Disney has no incentive to provide anything either. The pirated copies will survive though, and most likely still be available.
I think in order to enjoy the limited and temporary protections of copyright you should be required to provide clean copies to the Library of Congress. Satisfy the needs of the Public Domain first.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:41AM
For software you should be required to provide complete build instructions, copies of source code, copies of published binaries, all documentation, and a build process which will provide verifiable builds. This must be done for *ALL* software to have copyright protection, which will ensure every point in the toolchain is available and functional. In order to now slow things down TOO badly, this can only be required once per year, or every 1-5 years alongside copyright renewal, which will allow periodic snapshotting and only require publishing at the initial release, and every renewal period, for which the developer can hopefully stage build instructions.
People haven't realized just how brittle our software and hardware ecosystem truly is, and without the documentation as well as comprehensive build instructions and periodic snapshots, most of it becomes impossible to build moving forward unless you have the software archeology and history available to find the exact subset of released with which each library or application can be sucessfully compiled as well as run. There are breakages at both layers, as well as the hardware and most people ignore them.
If someone is feeling particularly political, take this information and compose a letter to Ron Wyden, or your local senator/representative and maybe someone can get an update to our copyright laws to remedy this major oversight in American and then international software copyright law.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:23AM (7 children)
Here is a decent list of the movies from 1924.
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=1924&title_type=feature&ref_=tt_ov_inf [imdb.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:33AM (1 child)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014945/ [imdb.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:59AM
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015014/ [imdb.com]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015051/ [imdb.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Thursday January 02 2020, @03:05AM (4 children)
Enjoy it while it lasts, no works after 1927 will ever enter the public domain so there's at maximum three years of new PD stuff left.
In case you don't recognise the significance of the date, 1928 was when Steamboat Willie [wikipedia.org] was released.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:55PM (2 children)
Time will tell, and at this rate, they've got 2-3 years to make their move. Though, they could always get something shoved in at the last second.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by tedd on Friday January 03 2020, @02:20AM (1 child)
How do you know Disney is *not* already working on this?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 06 2020, @03:23PM
I would surprised, if it's not on someone's to-do list.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:59PM
I doubt this for two reasons.
First, the only way the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 passed constitutional muster was that it harmonized the term of copyright[1] to that of several major trading partners in the European Union. The opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft was careful to distinguish harmonization from "legislative misbehavior" intended to circumvent the "limited Times" provision of the U.S. Constitution's copyright clause. The EU's mid-1990s extension, in turn, was intended to update the underlying so-called "three-generation principle" [copyrightalliance.org] to account for the fact that parents were having children later on average. How would lawmakers distinguish another yet another term extension from "legislative misbehavior"?
Second, in January 2018, Ars Technica ran a story stating that the Authors Guild opposes another term extension [arstechnica.com]. Do you really think Disney is going to fight the Authors Guild on this one?
[1] At least the term for post-1977 works not "made for hire."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:36AM (1 child)
But shouldn't it be "Works older than 1925" rather than "From 1924"
Semantics?, but makes it clearer.
FROM 1924 makes it seem like everything from 1924 on to today.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:00AM
Dear Gaaark,
From {object}. Is pretty clear meaning in most languages.
Even non human ones are explicit about GT etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_operator [wikipedia.org]
The internet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:38AM
The said loss of cultural artifacts is self-inflicted legal damage to Anglosphere culture by Anglosphere legal paradigm.
Completely without an usual war effect on culture, it is really eye brows raising situation...
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:39AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:47AM (1 child)
3-4 years ago I decided to encode all 2500 of my CDs (for the 3rd time, sigh, long story). Quickly found out that it's much quicker to look for a torrent and download it. Is that breaking the law? I have the CD. It may not be easy to get to (yeah, you try storing 2500 CDs after a divorce moves you from a 3 br house to a small 1 br apartment) but, if you make me I can find the CD.
Yeah, I was the guy 20 years ago entering track info for Gentle Giant, Van Der Graaf Generator, and such to CDDB. Who turned around and fucked me by going private and selling that info.
Whatever. Seems to me the only thing copyright does nowdays is prevent JJ Abrams from changing Mickey Mouse's origin story. Which, if you think about it, could be pretty fricken awesome.
Bad decisions, great stories
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:17AM
Well, that and deep fakes of Mickey & Minnie Mouse
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:40AM (8 children)
If I can scan books with a copyright date of 1924 or prior I can upload and share them legally now?
I'm ~10 miles from a 108 year old university library, so this is not a hypothetical question.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:02AM (2 children)
Yes, though you should do it in coordination, or at least consultation, with Project Gutenberg or one of the other corresponding projects. They'll have a lot of advice about efficient methods.
Realize that the "easiest" way completely destroys the book and the library might not be so keen on that happening. Same for the next easiest way. Instead, you'll need some non-reflective glass plates and a frame which can hold the book open at a 90° angle while pressing the pages flat so they can be photographed with a digital camera.
Then once you have all the pages photographed, run them through an OCR in bulk. You can then publish the photos above the dirty-OCR insdie HTML documents as you work through the tedious correction process to fix the OCR mistakes. An alternate to OCR is to send the digital copies to two separate impoverished regions for re-keying under very low wages. Then just do a diff of the two and, presumably, the text is good where it is the same which leaves very little additional manual intervention.
If you are going to do this with valuable manuscripts or handwritten books, then OCR is not relevant and you should, for other reasons, work in coordination with the preservation department. In that case, you would probably take fine-grained film photos first, then digitize those. The reason for that is the negative, especially for a Hassleblad or similar large-format camera, is very much higher resolution than any of today's digital camera and can be kept on file and used to make research copies on demand for most use-cases without further distressing the original artifact. That is a good idea because increased visibility will also mean increased demand. Lastly, if the scan just ends up being a shopping list for thieves, there is still a somewhat usable surrogate on file.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:15PM
http://scantailor.org/ [scantailor.org] - using this to preprocess the page images, greatly reduces the OCR errors afterwards. Even using a free OCR tool such as Tesseract.
For best OCR results, the page images should be at 600 DPI or thereabouts, and in any case, at no less than 300 DPI.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday January 03 2020, @09:39PM
It looks like Google does a lot of this [google.com]. They already have arrangements with some libraries to bring in expensive scanning equipment in and digitize old and rare books; maybe they could hook up with yours too.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:41PM (3 children)
Yes. However note that the owner of the physical book might place restrictions to what you can do with it. Including not allow you to scan it in the first place.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:23PM (2 children)
Not likely at a university or a library, who are probably scanning it themselves, anyway. I found a copy of Only Yesterday, required reading in a college history class I had at SIU, at the University of Virginia's web site.
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:47PM (1 child)
That depends on the state of the book. Scanning it the wrong way may break it. You probably don't have expensive non-destructive book scanner.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 03 2020, @12:35PM
Your phone is a non-destructive book scanner good enough for an OCR to convert it to text. The Vatican is scanning thousand year old documents.
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:21PM
Yes, you can, and if you find any good science fiction from then let me know and I'll post it on my book site.
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry